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Comment by hellisothers | Hacker News Reader

Every person I’ve ever met who espouses “crypto” sounds like they’re in a cult trying to recruit new members. I can’t recall meeting a person who uses crypto who when asked about it (if they didn’t bring it up first) treated it like “oh, yea, crypto, it’s whatever, you just use it or don’t”.

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Have you tried doing an ACH to a friend or paid rent that way recently? Banks force you to Zelle (there are daily/weekly limits) they’re not enough to cover modern rents so you breakup payments. Meanwhile any stable coin transfer can be done in minutes and works better than any payment rail ever.

Edit: I got my landlord to open a Coinbase account because stablecoin payments are way easier (also got a signup bonus for referring a new account)

Pretty much every other developed country has solved this problem without having to transact in digital lottery tickets.

Yes and no. I can eTransfer in Canada... to a limit of $2,000 CAD daily. Rent is $2,100, so parent's point stands.

I could upgrade my cellphone and use Google Play Services, allowing up to $10,000 CAD daily, but I have no intention of doing so. I think it's messed up to tie my financial and digital sovereignty to a foreign corporation, I don't appreciate the hit to battery life, privacy, and the pre-requisite bump in hardware to run GApps, and I simply don't want to end up on the spending treadmill for new cellphones.

Canada "solved" this, but the limits haven't kept up with inflation or life in general

In Australia I can send $20k. In the UK it was similar.

These concerns seem very weird to me.

They kind of are, I'll immediately cop to that. I don't think it's that odd to say the constant upgrade treadmill is expensive though. I also don't appreciate gating features of our society behind smartphone ownership.

My specific concerns are odd. Not appreciating smartphone requirements for life feels more mainstream (if only marginally)

I’m not tied to a smartphone to do those things in the UK or Aus either.

Different geographies work differently I guess. In Brazil there’s an entire payment network (pix) that is centrally run, free and hugely popular.

My living partner transfers me money via ACH each month to share our expenses. It's effectively instant.

You've undoubtedly done this before the IRS/Treasury $600 dollar reporting requirements... try to do this with someone new.

ACH isn't instant, but if you use the same bank they may use something besides ACH to affect the transfer.

ACH is... FTPing around flat files, at some point in the day. Or the next day. Plus time for clearing.

FedNow is closer to instant

For the purpose of making rent payments, it doesn't matter.

I have never been forced to use Zelle instead of ACH. You just have to know how to arrange an ACH payment with your financial institution.

Europe just nixed the general €100K limit on SEPA instant transfers. Before that, you had to split it up or wait 1-2 days for the regular transfer to go through.

We should meet.

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